May 24, 2012

Since the announcement of SkillPort® 8 at the Perspectives conference a few weeks ago, our customers have been buzzing with excitement! SkillPort 8, a revolutionary cloud-based learning experience, delivers targeted learning —when and where people want to learn. By connecting formal, informal, and collaborative learning, ittransforms web-based learning from a solitary event to a richer, continuous community-oriented experience.Over the next few weeks, stay tuned for posts that focus on specific SkillPort 8 features and functionality such as search, catalog and community. Today, we’ll cover SkillPort 8’s “search functionality.”

To build the search functionality for SkillPort 8, we studied the world-class sites where users already know how to find and buy:

·Travel

·Movies

·Music

·Merchandise

These sites provide rich search engines and filtering tools to pare down what is being viewed into those most relevant to the need. The objective is to get the customer to the right product as quickly as possible and make that sale. And when we studied perhaps a dozen of the top sites, we were struck by the similarities in their design.

With SkillPort 8, our goal is similar... to deliver a better and more effective search experience by helping learner’s wade through a wide array of learning assets to find and access the items of greatest relevance to that day’s need. And we felt the best way to do that was to emulate the consumer and social sites learners already use day-in and day-out. We’re all consumers at heart!

Search has always been a simple yet powerful feature of SkillPort, but we drastically improved the user’s search experience in SkillPort 8 by providing new tools that alleviate the frustration and complexity of having to browse catalogs to find what they are looking for.Learners can now broaden or narrow a search for courses, books, videos, and other related content in a number of ways:

1.Find all relevant content based on keyword searches and present the search results in an easy to use fashion.

6.Sort results by various attributes such as Relevance, Publish Date, Recommended, or Alphabetical.

The new SkillPort 8 search experience is fast, efficient, and returns relevant results in a highly visual interface to keep learners engaged.As a result, learners are able to obtain the skills needed to solve organizational challenges more quickly.